What is the largest planet?
Quick answer
Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system. It’s about 139,820 km (86,880 miles) wide, roughly 11 times the width of Earth, and more than twice as massive as all the other planets combined.
You could fit about 1,300 Earths inside Jupiter. Yet even Jupiter is small next to the Sun, which is roughly ten times wider still.
The planets ranked by size
| Rank | Planet | Diameter | Compared with Earth |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jupiter | 139,820 km | 11.0× |
| 2 | Saturn | 116,460 km | 9.1× |
| 3 | Uranus | 50,724 km | 4.0× |
| 4 | Neptune | 49,244 km | 3.9× |
| 5 | Earth | 12,742 km | 1× |
| 6 | Venus | 12,104 km | 0.95× |
| 7 | Mars | 6,779 km | 0.53× |
| 8 | Mercury | 4,879 km | 0.38× |
What is Jupiter made of?
Jupiter is a gas giant, made mostly of hydrogen and helium, like a star that never grew big enough to ignite. It has no solid surface to land on. Deeper down, the pressure becomes so extreme that hydrogen behaves like a liquid metal, which helps create the planet’s enormous magnetic field.
By the numbers
- 318×
- Jupiter’s mass compared with Earth’s
- ~10 hours
- Length of a Jupiter day, the shortest of any planet
- ~12 years
- Time Jupiter takes to orbit the Sun
- 90+
- Known moons, and new ones are still being found
The Great Red Spot
Jupiter’s most famous feature is a storm larger than Earth that has been raging for at least 150 years and possibly much longer. It has been slowly shrinking in recent decades, but it’s still big enough to swallow our planet.
Jupiter’s giant moons
Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system, even bigger than the planet Mercury. Europa is thought to hide a salty ocean under its icy shell, making it one of the most promising places to search for life beyond Earth.
Want to compare with the star at the center? Here’s how hot the Sun is, or how long it takes just to reach our neighbor Mars.
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